C H A P T E R | S I X T E E N

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I went back to the cabin. Alone. It wasn't the smartest idea, but I needed answers.

The only clues I could think of took me back to this dump. The fact that Amelia's body was stuck here and then disappeared was odd, but her body couldn't have gotten far, right? This was the only cabin around, unless there was another place somewhere nearby. Though, I doubted it since it'd be hard to drag a body elsewhere in the brutal winter.

If he was smart, he would've thought about that.

The other clue, or whatever the hell it was, was the love and hate letters I had found before, when Nick and I discovered this place. It could've been nothing for all I knew, but when you took everything into consideration as evidence, that meant everything. I still had the crumpled pieces of paper tucked away in my journal, stuck between the middle pages.

When I walked in, daylight poured through the cracks of the windows, shining on the broken floorboards and trash that littered the rooms.

"Where do I start?" I said, shutting the door behind me.

I clasped my hands together and moved through the rooms, heading my way to the room with the bathtub.

In the daytime, it was hard not to notice how closed-off the house was to each space. Each area was a room, walls and doors cutting off the social interaction of what could've been. A door to the kitchen, a door to the living room, a door into the dining room, and a door into the den. It was like the creator built it just to build, taking up the money and time to make the steady foundations and walls and doors that went everywhere. In every direction imaginable. Room after room.

The area with the bathtub was a bit larger than I remembered when we came through earlier today. Perhaps I wasn't paying any mind to the details, but now that I was searching for answers, my eyes could have been re-adjusted to freshen up what I had seen.

The bathtub was still the same as it was before. Patches of red, insects roaming around inside and out like it was home. But the shower curtain was missing. Before, it covered the backside of Amelia's head when we discovered her body. After writing down the piece of information, I began searching around again.

Dressers lined the walls near the door. I sifted through each of them—at least the ones that still had drawers inside the furniture—until I reached the last one on the bottom. Nothing found.

I stood, turning around. Nothing was here but two doors to go through. One went down the stairs, toward the basement. I knew nothing was there, so I reached for the other door. Locked.

"You've got to be—" I lowered my head, placing my hands on the back of it. After a moment, an idea popped into mind, and although I had doubts, it was better than nothing.

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